Geological Situation 1.7mn yrs back!

Did we really need bridge between India and Srilanka?

Lets find out.

We have studied that a long time back existed a single landmass, a super-continent from which came the continents of today. Right?

Well, this is a partial truth. There did exist this single, super-continent called Pangea with a single ocean that we call Tethys. But they existed very briefly, when placed on the geological time scale of earth.

We will not go into minute details rather address the major events of earth's geological history.

Pangea existed between 500Ma-180Ma (1 Megannum(Ma)= 1 million years). Before Pangea existed Laurasia and East and West Gondwana Land. After Pangea, started the formation of the various continental plates which over the last 180 million years has given the current shape of Earth.

So when did Earth start looking like what it is today? Probably and atleast 10mn years back. Scientists have tried to reconstruct the formation of these lands and have arrived at the conclusion on the basis of many complex sources that Indian Subcontinental plate touched the Eurasian Plate approximately 10Ma and this led to the orogenic belt of Tibetan Plateau and Himalay Mountain Range.



Srilanka was a trailing island much smaller than its current form. The image above gives a fair idea of a continued separation of the Srilankan Island from the Indian Plate.

A comment from Malacalogist while studying the Deccan Traps says, "The land area of what is now Sri Lanka was much smaller at 65 Ma and it was further from the continental landmass at the time that it could have acted as a biotic refuge from the Deccan Trap lava flows." (Malacologist is the Official Journal of Malacalogical Society of London and this comment was published in their Bulletin no.45. I have published this without any permission for reproduction. However, if the society has any specific policy regarding reporoduction of information already in public domain, I will be happy to follow their policy)

In all, the point we are driven at after going through this current understanding of paleo-geographics is that there indeed was a need to build a bridge between Southern India and Northern Sri Lanka. It also, however indicates that this need may have arisen because they may not have developed large navigable sea vessels to transport such a large army across a waterbody.



Above image shows the state of tectonic plate movements across the globe in the Neogene Period (The current period which cover 23mn years back-till date).




Current state of the Ram Setu.



An enlarged portion of the Ram Setu.


In the next post we will understand the Human Natural History aspect of Ramayan.

Questions arising from Ramayan

Whenever we sit down to analyse a document like Ramayan and compare the folklores and available scientific information, many interesting questions arise. Some questions take us through the chapters that we had forgotten to read in school and college. Some lead us to a realization that till different disciplines of education are not combined we donot get a holistic picture of the subject under investigation.

Some of these important questions that came to my mind as well that of other friends and associates are:

1. Was there are need for a bridge between India and Srilanka, when we have been taught in our Geography classes that many years ago existed a single supercontinent called Pangea?
2. Man came from an ape. Various stages of such development led to the current form of Homo Sapiens. So how was it that a Man was not only interacting with Ape like beings but also collabrating on missions of sensitive nature?
3. How did they ever think of an aeroplane (Pushpak Viman) so many years back? They even had a word for this mechanical device!
4. When script came into existence only a few thousand years ago(5000yrs back approx.) and paper came into being in only 104A.D. would someone seriously be interested in taking up a humongously tedious task of writing down a piece of fiction?
5. Is it really true that most humans in the history or in the pre-historical era acted in a frivolous manner as it is assumed to be in today's time. Hadn't certain faculties of our mind developed enough to do some serious and truthful work? Does an imaginative mind indicate an underdeveloped mental faculty for being intelligent and serious?
6. Is our current understanding of science and history the absolute understanding or have we been experiencing evolution in both even within the last 100 years?
7. Are historians very sure of the story they build up on the basis of archaelogical findings and other sources or do they give us the "most probable" story that can be consistently built from such sources?

There are many more questions but in this blog I will focus on these questions post-by-post. In future I will also try to involve the experts on various systems by bringing in their comments on the inferences we have drawn here. This will help us maintain the reliability and credibility of our new understanding of Ramayan.

I hope the following posts will help us look at Ramayan slightly differently from our traditionally held view.